… of Tony Bennett. He’s 80. There was a nice tribute/review in yesterday’s Times.
… of Martin Sheen, 66. Sheen won one Golden Globe for West Wing, but no Emmys. He did win an Emmy once for a guest role on Murphy Brown.
… of Martha Stewart, 65.
… of Jay North (TV’s Dennis the Menace). He’s 55.
… of quarterback Tom Brady, 29.
Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, on this date in 1492.
… was designated by President Wilson on this date in 1918.
For over a thousand years, prehistoric farmers inhabited much of the present-day state of Arizona. When the first Europeans arrived, all that remained of this ancient culture were the ruins of villages, irrigation canals and various artifacts. Among these ruins is the Casa Grande, or “Big House,” one of the largest and most mysterious prehistoric structures ever built in North America. Casa Grande Ruins, the nation’s first archeological preserve, protects the Casa Grande and other archeological sites within its boundaries.
… was born on this date in 1900. Until he was killed by enemy fire in April 1945, Pyle “blogged” World War II for millions of Americans.
From The New York Times obituary.
Ernie Pyle was haunted all his life by an obsession. He said over and over again, “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.”
No man could have been less justified in such a fear. Word of Pyle’s death started tears in the eyes of millions, from the White House to the poorest dwellings in the country.
President Truman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt followed his writings as avidly as any farmer’s wife or city tenement mother with sons in service.
Mrs. Roosevelt once wrote in her column “I have read everything he has sent from overseas,” and recommended his writings to all Americans.
For three years these writings had entered some 14,000,000 homes almost as personal letters from the front. Soldiers’ kin prayed for Ernie Pyle as they prayed for their own sons.
NewMexiKen has before posted this quote from Pyle, but why not do so again on his birthday, and because there’s no place like home.
Yes, there are lots of nice places in the world. I could live with considerable pleasure in the Pacific Northwest, or in New England, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or in Key West or California or Honolulu. But there is only one of me, and I can’t live in all those places. So if we can have only one house — and that’s all we want — then it has to be in New Mexico, and preferably right at the edge of Albuquerque where it is now. Ernie Pyle, January 1942
Pyle’s home on Girard SE is now a branch of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library System.
A beautiful evening in Albuquerque, about 80º at sunset. The sun shining through the clouds just before it went down reminded me of the depiction of heaven and God in my childhood parochial school religion books.
Saw an Albuquerque Fire Department truck imprinted with big letters “HEAVY RESCUE.” I didn’t even want to think about what heavy rescue could be. It was a big truck, solid — looked like a big red toolbox.
Which reminds me, I’m glad I live in a city with red firetrucks like God intended.
It’s remarkable how a few inches of rain turns the desert green in such a short time. Oh I know, it isn’t green like Ireland or New Zealand, it’s perhaps only green to us, but it sure is nice. Very nice.
We have irrigated green in Albuquerque (trees and grass and such). I’m talking about the mountains or the empty fields, such as the Sandia Pueblo land just north of Casa NewMexiKen; the prettiest drive in town — Tramway from the turn to the casino, the bison an added bonus.
Read today that United Airlines turned a profit for the first time in a long time this quarter. Good for them, though in my opinion they could have gotten there a lot sooner if they didn’t send me a credit card solicitation in the mail every other day. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the credit card companies just assumed we had all the credit cards we wanted — lord knows we have all we need — and put a moratorium on mailings?
My mail arrived yesterday at 6:42 PM. Today it was more normal, just after 5 I think. Isn’t this ridiculous? And where’s my New Yorker?
“Authorities say Gibson was traveling at 87 mph, with a bottle of tequila in the car, when his 2006 Lexus LS 430 was stopped Friday morning at 2:36 a.m.”
Another take on Wikipedia, this from Marshall Poe in The Atlantic Monthly. Poe introduces us to the phenomenon:
Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind. The English-language version alone has more than a million entries. It is consistently ranked among the most visited Web sites in the world. A quarter century ago it was inconceivable that a legion of unpaid, unorganized amateurs scattered about the globe could create anything of value, let alone what may one day be the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in human history. Back then we knew that people do not work for free; or if they do work for free, they do a poor job; and if they work for free in large numbers, the result is a muddle. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger knew all this when they began an online encyclopedia in 1999. Now, just seven years later, everyone knows different.
Elsewhere, Stephen Colbert adapts Wikipedia to his needs.
Blonde: Look, there’s the Chrysler. Look, there’s Times Square. Where’s the Empire State Building?
Overheard at the top of Empire State Building by englishman in new york
In case you’re wondering Albuquerqueans, it hasn’t hit 100° in Albuquerque in the month of August since 1994, so we might possibly be having our third consecutive summer without reaching triple digits.
The National Weather Service has everything you might want to know about 100°days in Albuquerque.
NewMexiKen has received my first of Ken Jennings’ weekly trivia quizzes and I must say it’s tough. They’re sent by email, so click the link to sign up.
Meanwhile The Quiz Blogger has some trivia quizzes (posted to the blog) that are just incredible.
It wouldn’t be right to copy trivia from either Jennings or The Quiz Blogger, so I won’t except to give you this example of the first six of 100 questions from the latter’s A Hundred Strong BH82 For Pondering on a Summer’s Day:
1 Famed for its Konig pilsener and its regional brands Licher Pilsner and Lubzer Pils, which brewery was founded in Hamburg’s Altona district in 1879 and produces 12.9 hectolitres of beer per year?
2 Which 24-year-old Australian motorcycle racer rides a Suzuki GSX-R1000 and is the reigning World Superbikes champion?
3 Which pair, one the MP for Dewsbury, the other MP for Tooting, were the first British-born Muslims to be elected to the House of Commons
4 In the 1989 Tour de France which French cyclist and Tour winner in 1983 and 1984, did Greg Lemond beat by just eight seconds to win the competition?
5 In which sport is the Swatch-FIVB World Tour a competition?
6 Which Ethiopian tribe in the remote corner of country known as the Omo Valley is famed for its unique rituals, including its coming-of-age ceremony, which sees young men of the village jumping over cattle while their female relatives are whipped? One spelling of its name is shared with a Norwegian town.
Seven-time Oscar nominee for best actor, Peter O’Toole is 74 today.
Director-writer-producer Wes Craven is 67.
Eddie Munster, aka actor Butch Patrick, is 53.
Emmy-winner, for Angels in America, Mary Louise Parker is 42.
Actress Myrna Loy was born on this date in 1905. IMDB has her listed for an incredible 138 roles, beginning with silent films when she was the femme fatale, but more famously as the witty, urbane Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. NewMexiKen liked her in The Best Years of Our Lives, a film everyone should see. It won seven Academy Awards in 1946.
Author James Baldwin was born on this date in 1924.
After writing a number of pieces that were published in various magazines, Baldwin went to Switzerland to finish his first novel. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans was unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN has long been considered an American classic. Throughout the rest of the decade, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1955) and GIOVANNI’S ROOM (1956). Dealing with taboo themes in both books (homosexuality and interracial relationships, respectively), Baldwin was creating socially relevant and psychologically penetrating literature. (American Masters | PBS)
James Butler Hickok was killed while playing poker in Deadwood 130 years ago today.
… was first designated a national monument on this date in 1937. It became a national park in 1971.
The Waterpocket Fold, a 100-mile long wrinkle in the earth’s crust known as a monocline, extends from nearby Thousand Lakes Mountain to the Colorado River (now Lake Powell). Capitol Reef National Park was established to protect this grand and colorful geologic feature, as well as the unique historical and cultural history found in the area.
America’s most popular vehicles (based on new sales) July 2006:
Ford F Series…68,892
Chevrolet Silverado…66,583
Toyota Camry…41,892
Toyota Corolla…41,800
Honda Accord…38,043
Dodge Ram…32,793
Honda Civic…28,607
Chevrolet Impala…26,480
Chevrolet Cobalt…23,961
GMC Sierra…22,947
Honda Pilot…19,490
Honda Odyssey…18,322
Writing in Vanity Fair, Michael Bronner has produced 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes, an article discussing what really happened in the air that morning, complete with transcripts and recordings.
The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America’s military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or NORAD’s impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It’s a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.
The truth, however, is all on tape.
Simply fascinating.
New Mexico’s ten worst intersections ranked by number of collisions. The first nine of these are in Albuquerque, the last is in Española.
| Intersection | Total | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 |
| Coors & Paseo del Norte | 430 | 187 | 123 | 120 |
| Montgomery & Wyoming | 342 | 92 | 130 | 120 |
| Montgomery & San Mateo | 339 | 99 | 118 | 122 |
| Jefferson & Paseo del Norte | 321 | 129 | 105 | 87 |
| Coors & Irving | 294 | 104 | 93 | 97 |
| Coors Bypass & Ellison | 288 | 95 | 101 | 92 |
| Coors Bypass & Seven-Bar Loop | 262 | 82 | 80 | 100 |
| Coors & Quail | 254 | 103 | 80 | 71 |
| Montgomery & Eubank | 227 | 83 | 71 | 73 |
| NM 584 & Riverside Dr. | 224 | 74 | 71 | 79 |
Update: Here are Albuquerque’s 25 busiest intersections, ranked by daily volume in 2004. Those listed above are indicated with #.
Source: MRCOG
Paseo del Norte and Coors is not among the busiest, though it has had the most collisions. Beware! (And there is a traffic camera there to nab light runners.)
NewMexiKen once read that, as with every other phase, we would know when the “boomers” — those 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 — were getting old when we started to see the books about trendy funerals. And so, here is one of those books, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s thoroughly readable Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death.
There have been substantial changes in the funeral business already. One-quarter of all Americans who die are now cremated; in 20 years half are expected to be. The floral industry has been decimated by the term “in lieu of flowers.” According to a 2004 survey cited in the book, 71 percent of Americans do not want a traditional funeral; 14 percent indicated they wanted “a party in my honor.” In a business as tradition-bound and as comfortable in its ways as any — a business where “the words tradition and history are usually engraved right on the company letterhead” — Americans don’t want morticians anymore, they want “funeral planners.”
And what are the funeral planners planning? Cullen set out to learn:
What kind of person turns a loved one into jewelry? What’s it like to watch an artificial reef mixed with the cremated remains of your parent sink to the bottom of the sea? How exactly is a modern mummy made? Where would I find a festival celebrating a frozen corpse? What’s the proper etiquette at a funeral involving animal sacrifice? Who would become a funeral director today—and why?
The most fascinating alternative to tradition we learn about from Cullen has to be turning the cremated remains of one’s loved one into jewelry.
The first step is to collect the cremains. Eight ounces of ashes can yield enough carbon to make up to ten diamonds of up to one carat each in size. Eight ounces is only a smidgen of the four to six pounds of ashes a human body produces—all of which is enough, the company says, for at least one hundred diamonds.
The carbon is turned into graphite; the graphite with pressure, temperature and a few weeks is turned into a diamond — all for just $2,500 to $14,000 depending on the size of the stone. The process is artificial; the diamonds are real.
A correspondent for Time, Cullen is a witty and charming writer whose style keeps a serious topic from becoming maudlin. She has a wonderful knack for turning a clever phrase or coining a revealing term: “end-trepreneuers,” “vigilante marketing” or, my favorite, “inebriating headline writers with a minibar of cliché opportunities.” Cullen’s infant daughter accompanied her on much of the research for the book as her “diaper-wearing assistant.”
When writing about turning a loved one into diamonds, there’s just the right touch:
This, too, is interesting to me. I had not realized that diamonds, all diamonds, could crack; I had thought the diamond was the hardest substance on earth. … As bad as I would feel cracking the stone my husband paid for by teaching fifty hours of clarinet lessons to fourth-graders, I think about how much worse I would feel if this stone were, say, my mom.
Or, about mourners scattering ashes at sea:
Of course, the practice of ash disposition at sea is hardly new. I venture to guess that many a family has gathered on a beach at dusk past the empty lifeguard stands to cast Pop-pop’s cremains into the surf. They are breaking the law. … I imagine this law is not easy to enforce. I personally have never seen federal agents skulking around the Jersey shore at twilight, arresting sad-looking families carrying bags of dust.
Cullen’s many stories about the deceased are poignant, sufficiently emotional to supply the reader with just enough attachment to make a discussion of their funeral affecting.
As Cullen herself reminds us, “death is a big, huge bummer.” It is not a subject we frequently discuss. That said, it is a subject that holds much fascination — it is the one event we all share in life. Remember Me is a masterful book because it introduces us to the topic with just the right balance of sensitivity, information, and humor.
This fascinating, informative, at times moving, at times amusing book deserves your attention. It was published August 1.
“As you may have heard, Mel Gibson was arrested in Malibu on a DUI. I don’t know what he was drinking but I think you can rule out Manischewitz.”
Jay Leno, who went on to add:
“Police said today that they found a bottle of tequila in Mel’s Lexus. So let’s sum up what happened here: Mel Gibson, who grew up in Australia, was drinking alcohol from Mexico in his Japanese car while yelling about the Jews in Israel. You know where he was coming from? A Thai restaurant. Welcome to America.”
At first NewMexiKen thought Crocs were silly (not to say unattractive). Then I began to read about them and even check them out at REI. If I had any remaining doubts this article has ended them.
So, my question: Crocs only come in full sizes. My feet come in a half-size. Do I go bigger or smaller?
[Update: Looking around I checked Amazon.com for Crocs. Amazon sells them through Nordstrom. Amazon and Nordstrom, who knew?]
When NewMexiKen visited Havana some years ago, American officials in a position to know told me their greatest fear was, that when Castro lost power, the exiles in Miami would think they were entitled to return and assume control. My sources were certain that the Cubans who had remained in Cuba and suffered through decades of repression and deprivation would not lightly surrender power and property to those who had left, most nearly 50 years ago.
Civil war was, they feared, the likely outcome.
The New Yorker had an excellent article last week about whether the revolution could outlive its leader, Castro’s Last Battle.
Two of America’s top authors, John Irving and Stephen King, made a plea to J.K. Rowling on Tuesday not to kill the fictional boy wizard Harry Potter in the final book of the series, but Rowling made no promises.
Reuters via Yahoo! News
This strikes NewMexiKen as a bit presumptuous of them.
Rowling said, “I’ve reached my resolution, and I think some people will loathe it and some people will love it, but that’s how it should be.”
This from Guardian Unlimited:
Not only can you judge a book by its cover, it seems you can judge the person reading it, too. According to a survey of over 2,000 adults carried out by internet pollsters YouGov for Borders bookstore, books play a crucial role in influencing our opinions of strangers. Half of those asked admitted that they would look again or smile at someone on the basis of what they were reading.
And it gets better. For those of you troubled by the lingering idea (instilled in youth by parents obsessed with the benefits of “enjoying the sunshine”) that a life spent reading is a life half-lived, your worries are over. Not only does sitting with your nose in a book positively influence others’ opinion of you, it could actually – get this – lead to sex. A third of those surveyed said that they “would consider flirting with someone based on their choice of literature”. It’s finally official, people. Reading is hot.
But before you trip off to the park clad in your most fetching sun hat and clutching your copy of the latest Jilly Cooper – be warned. Not just any book will do. Erotic fiction, horror, self-help books and the dreaded chick-lit were all, in fact, deemed turn-offs when it came to love between the covers. The genre most likely to help you pull – the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini of the books world – is the classics, followed by biography and modern literary fiction
Does blogging about the classics count? Today is Herman Melville’s birthday.
Link via Bookslut.
The warmest it has been during the past five days in Albuquerque is just 84º (it’s only 68º at Casa NewMexiKen late Tuesday morning, though the humidity is 98%). The high temperature so far this summer is 98º (twice in June, once in July).
The inch-plus of rain (officially) yesterday took the July total to 3.55 inches. Droughts are long-term and depend more on snow-pack than anything, so a few inches of rain doesn’t change much, but it sure is nice.
[Update: It was the wettest July here in 75 years of official record-keeping.]
Jill, official daughter of NewMexiKen, has decided this would not be a good place for a kid’s birthday party. Read the last sentence.
Two-time cast member NewMexiKen was pleased to see an article in The New York Times on the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters.
Is the tableau vivant passé? Not for the 155,000 fans who flock to this beachside town each summer for the pageant. For them, the two-month extravaganza — a $4.1 million production that includes sets and lighting for nearly 40 art pieces on eight staging areas with live narration and orchestra — weaves a magic that is a welcome palliative to the freneticism of modern-day entertainment.
The Pageant of the Masters dates back to 1933, when a much smaller version was organized to publicize an arts festival featuring local artists, which is still held in tandem with the pageant each summer (this year from July 7 to Sept. 1.). Today the tableau vivant pageant has an all-volunteer cast of about 300, and over the years it has added themes, movement, singing and surprises — from a cowboy on a real horse to the uncorking of a 20-foot-tall champagne bottle — to maintain its appeal.
Jill and Emily, official daughters of NewMexiKen, were cast members, too; Emily twice, first at age four. Jill was six. Son Ken made a one time guest appearance as well. He would have been eight. (They depicted children, though often children were needed just for their size to portray characters in the distance — that is, proportionally smaller.)
It was great fun, especially in the first few weeks. They had two complete casts so that you got a week on and a week off, though as the summer passed the drive to Laguna Beach, the application of makeup and costumes, the brief actual performance, and the cleanup and trip home could grow wearisome. Still, one of the most memorable experiences of my life.
Oh, yeah. I was part of a depiction of a famous set of figures from the Lisbon harbor, “The Discoverers,” and a card player from one of Cezanne’s paintings. The children were in the Ted DeGrazia UNICEF plate, “Los Niños.”
The wonderful Thurl Ravenscroft was the narrator in those days — you know him better as “Tony the Tiger.”
The Pageant is really something everyone should try and see at least once. It’s grrrreat!
In case you’re uncertain, a tableau vivant is a recreation of artworks, with humans “positioned to take the place of characters in reproductions than can be as big as 35 feet wide and 14 feet high. The models are then made two-dimensional by lighting and the elimination of shadows.” Generally you hold the pose for 90 seconds, though in “The Discoverers” it was seven minutes.
Trash talking isn’t so bad in American sports, just gay-baiting.
McRae said that when he was playing, much of the trash talk he heard was about sexual orientation.
“There were probably more comments about that than anything else because of just the way it is in our society,” he said. “If you knew or suspected a guy was gay, you would try to get under his skin.”
The IRS is firing the tax attorneys but cheating is out of control.
[Interesting that this article is by the same reporter as the one about firing half the tax attorneys, but no mention of it.]
So many superrich Americans evade taxes using offshore accounts that law enforcement cannot control the growing misconduct, according to a Senate report that provides the most detailed look ever at high-level tax schemes.
…Cheating now equals about 7 cents out of each dollar paid by honest taxpayers, as much as $70 billion a year, the report estimated.
Japanese manufacturers now make more cars in the U.S. than they do in Asia.
Since then, Japanese production has expanded on every major continent. According to 2005 figures, the most recent breakdown from the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association has 4.08 million vehicles made in the United States, 3.96 million in Asia, 1.55 million in Europe, 645,000 in Latin America, 226,000 in Africa, 135,000 in Australia and 10,500 in the Middle East.
[Update: Later Tuesday it was announced that Toyota had passed Ford in July to become the second largest carmaker in the U.S., after G.M. Honda could pass Daimler-Chrysler for fourth place soon.]
“On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
— David Weinberger, with a play on Andy Warhol’s maxim, as quoted by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker.